The SIGGRAPH 2009 conference is currently going down in New Orleans, where professionals from all over the creative industries are meeting up to talk computer graphics. id, creators of Doom, Quake and now Rage, are among the companies giving presentations.
And as part of their talk on "virtual texturing", the company presented some new Rage screenshots, which were dutifully picked up by Shacknews. And my oh my are they pretty. I won't try and sum up what virtual texturing actually means (it's something to do with very, very large textures), since it all seems a bit technical, but if that sounds like good reading to you a pdf of id's talk is at the link below.
Virtual Texturing [id, via Shacknews]